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Calder’s Heirs Accuse Trusted Dealer of Fraud

The bond between dealer and artist can be a kind of love affair, with its attendant passions and confidences, interests and intrigues.

Such was the case with the sculptor Alexander Calder and Klaus G. Perls, who represented him from 1954 until Calder’s death in 1976. The two frequently dined and traveled together, and visited each other’s families. When Calder came to Manhattan, he often stayed at Perls’s Madison Avenue townhouse.

“He trusted him completely,” said Calder’s grandson Alexander S. C. Rower, who added that he himself considered Perls and his wife, Amelia, “a dear aunt and uncle.”

But now that bond has dissolved into a bitter dispute between the families of the two men.

In a recently amended complaint filed in New York State Supreme Court, the Calder estate says the Perlses surreptitiously held on to hundreds of Calder’s works and swindled the artist’s estate out of tens of millions of dollars. Perhaps most surprising, it says that Perls, a dealer with a sterling reputation who campaigned to rid his industry of forgeries, sold dozens of fake Calders. The suit depicts Perls as a tax cheat who stashed millions of dollars in a Swiss bank account, a secret his daughter said she maintained by paying off a former gallery employee with $5 million. She added that Calder had his own hidden Swiss account.

Mr. Rower, seated in the Chelsea headquarters of the Calder Foundation, surrounded by small black-and-red maquettes made by his grandfather, reflected on the case one recent afternoon. “It’s really kind of heartbreaking that they turned out to be thieves,” he said of Klaus and Amelia Perls.

Steven W. Wolfe, a lawyer for the Perls side, declined to comment, saying a judge’s ruling on pending motions was imminent. But in court papers, he described the Calder lawsuit as a “sham and manufactured claim.” He characterized it as a fishing expedition, one that is finding only the sort of gaps in records that are normal when tracking 25-year-old transactions from a gallery that has been closed for more than 15 years. The Perls family has asked the court to dismiss the case, also arguing that the statute of limitations has expired.

That this close partnership has devolved into a lawsuit is a sorrowful development. While Calder is renowned as one of the 20th century’s most innovative artists, Perls has his own corner in the history of modern art. He was a pioneering collector of African art, and donated dozens of those pieces, as well as $60 million worth of masterworks by Modernists like Picasso and Modigliani, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Photo

The artist Alexander Calder, right, with his longtime dealer and close friend, Klaus G. Perls, in France in about 1974.Credit
Calder Foundation

When Perls died five years ago, at the age of 96, that museum’s director called him “a connoisseur and a scholar,” a “distinguished honorary trustee, donor and friend.”

Although many of the most surprising accusations surfaced in additional papers filed over the summer, the legal dispute began three years ago with a chance discovery. In 2010, a Canadian gallery contacted the Calder Foundation, of which Mr. Rower is chairman, about a $1.5 million wooden mobile titled “Standing Constellation.” It had been purchased from the Perls Foundation, a trust set up after the Perls Gallery closed in 1997. Mr. Rower said he was puzzled because “Standing Constellation” had not been listed on an inventory of holdings provided by the Perls Gallery after Calder’s death, nor had the Calder estate received any payment from its sale.

Mr. Rower, who has spent more than 15 years compiling the definitive catalog of Calder’s work, examined the Calder Foundation’s provenance records and said he found several other works in the Perls inventory that were later sold without the estate’s knowledge. Many were listed as being consigned by a woman in Switzerland known only as “Madame Andre.”

Mr. Rower said he was already frustrated with the dealer’s family because it had not turned over a large bundle of archives, drawings and monogramming tools used by Calder to sign his works that Amelia Perls, who died in 2002, had previously promised in a letter to give him. So in 2010, the Calder family sued the Perls estate; the dealer’s daughter, Katherine Perls; and “Madame Andre” for the archives and the works missing from the inventory.

As the estate began to dig, however, it made several discoveries.

First, “Standing Constellation” was only one of nearly 700 Calder bronze sculptures, jewelry and other works worth well in excess of $20 million that had been in the Perlses’ hands and are unaccounted for, court papers say.

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The Calder estate also learned that the gallery kept at least two sets of books — a practice that the Perls side said was not unusual. Then it came out that the mysterious “Madame Andre” was not a person at all, but a nickname for the Perls Swiss bank account. As Katherine Perls acknowledged in an affidavit, “Madame Andre” was a euphemism for her father’s Swiss account, “perhaps even a humorous or shorthand reference for this account, or to avoid disclosing to others who were present that he did have this Swiss account.”

Ms. Perls added that Calder, too, kept a Swiss bank account, to which Perls regularly transferred the artist’s profits. In court papers, Mr. Wolfe, the Perls lawyer, said, “Alexander Calder and Klaus Perls were kindred spirits in that they both had an aversion to paying taxes.”

Mr. Rower said that he has found no record of such an account and that the estate has never received any assets from it.

Photo

Questions about the provenance of Alexander Calder’s “Standing Constellation” (1943) set in motion a wide-ranging legal fight that is now in the courts.Credit
Calder Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Ms. Perls, in a deposition, dismissed the assertion that her family had hidden anything from Calder or his estate. While the original ledgers are missing, she said a copy shows that, in 1970, Calder gave “Standing Constellation” to her mother as a gift.

Ms. Perls has acknowledged that when a gallery employee, Douglas Mayhew, sued the family for severance worth $10 million in 2005, she feared he would reveal the hidden accounts in Switzerland to the I.R.S. and expose her aged father. As a result, she said, she agreed to pay Mr. Mayhew $5 million after taxes. According to court papers, she said she believed she was “being blackmailed.” Michael R. Gordon, Mr. Mayhew’s lawyer, declined to comment.

When the government instituted a tax amnesty program in 2009 for Americans who were hiding money in offshore accounts, the Perls estate applied, court papers show, and a settlement was reached.

Mr. Rower said the disturbing discoveries continued. In a deposition, Mr. Mayhew said that the Perls Gallery had sold approximately 30 fake Calders. Mr. Rower said that he is not sure whether such sales were intentional but that he knows the gallery had to settle some claims related to the sale of counterfeits in the 1980s.

“I was in there when someone walked in who had bought a fake,” Mr. Rower recalled.

But the number of these sales astounded him. By going through the foundation’s records and analyzing photographs of supposed Calder works, some of which were linked to known forgers, he said he has determined that the gallery handled at least 61 counterfeits.

Ms. Perls said in a deposition that she is convinced that her father never knowingly sold any fakes.

The Calder estate’s lawsuit contends that some illicit proceeds — from the sale of counterfeits and misappropriated Calder originals — were used to purchase the modern and African art that Perls gave to the Met, although the papers do not contain any specific evidence. The museum declined to comment.

James Goodman, a veteran dealer who was one of the founders, with Perls, of the Art Dealers Association of America, said he remains skeptical of the accusations, adding he always knew Klaus Perls to be an honorable dealer.

Mr. Rower says he came to his conclusion about Perls reluctantly. “It gives me no pleasure to talk about this,” he said, but “there is just example after example after example after example of misdeeds.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 30, 2013, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Calder’s Heirs Accuse Trusted Dealer of Fraud. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe